Hello Dryden and Tompkins County Readers
Marie McRae of the newly formed Dryden Resource Awareness Coalition (DRAC) sent the following along.
NY Attorney General's Office to Address Gas Leases, Other Marcellus Shale Issues
Thursday, August 20th, 7-9:30pm; Neptune Hose Fire Station (26 North Street)
Three experts will be present at a public forum in Dryden to give taxpayers, landowners, and other residents the opportunity to ask questions about natural-gas drilling in New York’s Marcellus Shale formation, and to consider their rights in the land leasing process. The event is being held on Thursday, August 20, from 7:00 – 9:30 pm in the Dryden Fire House Community Room (26 North Street, Route 13; next to Dunkin’ Donuts). Addressing those present will be NY State Assistant Attorneys General Michael Danaher and Roberto Barbosa, from the Binghamton Regional Office; they will speak about citizens rights in the leasing process. Their fifty-minute talk will be followed by a thirty-minute presentation by Andrew Byers, a Shaleshock organization leader, who will speak about gas drilling’s potential impacts to our community and the specific drilling technique planned for Tompkins County. There will be an opportunity to ask questions after the two presentations. Admission is free and refreshments will be served.
The forum is designed to address residents’ concerns about the pros and cons of signing a lease with a gas company, what options are available to landowners who choose not to sign a lease, and how industrial-scale gas-drilling might affect the county’s water resources, farm land, property values, tax base, truck-traffic volume, and recreational activities like tourism, hunting, birding, hiking, and biking.
Land leases give gas companies exclusive subsurface and/or surface rights in perpetuity for the purpose of clearing land, building roads, drilling wells, blasting rock, and hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas. It is estimated that up to 39 percent of the Town of Dryden’s land area is now under lease agreements.
For several years gas companies have been quietly signing up landowners in Tompkins County, and many landowners and their neighbors are just now asking questions about the lease-signing process: Should they sign—why or why not? Are the gas companies giving landowners full disclosure about the contract’s terms? Will gas companies share the locations of leased property? How flexible are the lease clauses? Can landowners gain leverage before signing contracts by forming a coalition? If the extraction technique is safe, why did gas companies lobby for and gain exemptions from federal environmental protection laws? How widespread is “compulsory integration,” whereby landowners who do not want leases are nevertheless required to participate if enough of their neighbors sign? How do insurance companies and mortgage lenders treat properties that have been encumbered with a gas lease?
Landowners and their neighbors are beginning to realize that by signing lease agreements, their monetary gain may come at a potentially large cost, not only to their land and drinking water, but also in their ability to use their property as they wish or to sell it. Public land, in the Town of Dryden and elsewhere, including NY State Forests, may also be leased, and the use of those public areas by residents for hunting, fishing, biking, snowmobiling, and other recreation could be curtailed. Indirect environmental and taxpayer issues include the anticipated increase in truck traffic (and roadway degradation) and paying for first-responders’ (EMTs) specialized training to handle truck accidents, chemical spills, well explosions, and gas-fed fires.
The relatively new drilling technique known as “hydraulic fracturing,” and commonly called “hydrofracking” or just “fracking,” requires not only a deep vertical bore (as with traditional wells) but also shafts off the vertical bore that run thousands of feet horizontally below ground. Millions of gallons of water—obtained from local sources and carried in dozens of tanker trucks to the three- to five-acre drilling site—are mixed with sand, lubricants, and chemicals and injected under high pressure through the drill bores and into the ground. The names and amounts of the chemicals used for each well are the gas companies’ proprietary information. Research into chemical spills around wells shows that many of the chemicals used are known or suspected to cause harm to humans and animals. This mix of water, chemicals, and sand is partially recovered after use. It is stored on site in open ponds, or trucked away to be dumped, treated, or permanently deposited in unused vertical wells. Because the gas does not come out of the ground under its own pressure, generators on the surface are used to pump the gas into massive collection pipelines. Independent firsthand observers and well-site neighbors describe those generators as being as loud as a “jet engine” and operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Moreover, access and maintenance roads are built to each well site and along pipelines, compacting topsoils and breaking up pastureland and wildlife habitat. In forested areas, the well pads and pipelines often result in clear-cutting many acres.
Much of New York’s Southern Tier lies above the Marcellus Shale, which begins around Marcellus, NY, and runs southwest through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. Some experts claim that this shale may contain energy resources equivalent to those of Saudi Arabia.
The Dryden public forum is sponsored by Dryden Resource Awareness Coalition (DRAC). DRAC, which was formed by a group of concerned Dryden residents in June 2009, seeks to learn the truth about the hydrofracking process, and to determine the effects it will have on local homes, roads, communities, and recreation areas, as well as the local economy. All concerned citizens are welcome to join. For additional information, contact: Marie McRae 607-280-9250 <mmmcrae@juno.com>, Martha Fischer <mf26@frontier.com>, or Hilary Lambert <hilary_lambert@yahoo.com>.
